Contentious time in the two Koreas

Choices about time continue to have symbolic power to represent difference or unity.

A waitress under a clock in Rason city in North Korea. Photograph: Ng Han Guan/AP

The UK Guardian reports:

Pyongyang Time
The North’s ‘highly regrettable’ decision to establish its own time zone will only deepen divisions between the neighbouring countries, says [South Korea’s] President Park.

The South Korean president, Park Geun-hye, has criticised the North’s “regrettable” decision to turn back its clocks to a new time zone, saying it would deepen divisions between the two rivals.

North Korea announced on Friday that it was changing its standard time to GMT+8:30, 30 minutes behind South Korea.

Pyongyang offered a nationalist rationale for the move, saying it would return the North to the time zone used before Japan imposed Tokyo Standard Time during its rule of the Korean peninsula, which ended in 1945.

Time has repeatedly been used for political-symbolic purposes, usually to establish difference, whether between territories or between regimes within the same territory as in the French and other revolutions. At the time of writing, today is the 28th of Thermidor in the year 223 of the French Revolutionary Calendar (probably - this page explains the ambiguities).

Wired UK points out some other timezone oddities, including an unusual example of using the same zone to represent affinity, rather than conflicting zones to represent difference:

Spain used to be on GMT. Much of Spain is further west than the UK but the country is on the same time zone as Germany. The oddity dates back to General Franco aligning the country with Germany 70 years ago.

Read the Guardian article here: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/aug/10/pyongyang-time-south-korea-response-north-korea

Read the Wired article here: http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2015-08/07/north-korea-time-zone